This video discusses the need to align the key components of your instruction: learning objectives, teaching strategies, learning activities, and assessments. It explains what instructional alignment is, provides examples, and explains why it is important.
Designing Your Course to Achieve Alignment
Beyond the Headlines: A Decision-Making Rubric for the Next Phase of Online Program Growth
As the number of online degrees have proliferated in recent years, it is even more important for institutions to take a more thoughtful approach to program selection. Often, a university must consider key issues like course offerings and schedules, degree specialization, and admissions requirements in order to offer a competitive online degree.
In this webinar offered 11/12/2014, academic leaders from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Ohio University discussed the key market forces that are present today, and how universities can best position their prospective degrees in the market. Panelists provided practical insights and recommendations on how to handle the change management for a university to offer competitive degree programs.
The participants in this webinar learned about:
- How to effectively plan for the online marketplace, validate program expansion, and reduce risk
- How to influence change across the institution to prepare to take degrees online
- Key considerations when evaluating online program management services
More details and a copy of the webinar slides, are available here.
NIU’s Customizations and Building Block for Blackboard Enterprise Surveys and Course Evaluations
Since the open discussion at BbWorld where NIU shared that we’ve been working on some system tweaks as well as a custom building block for providing an alternative reporting format for Bb enterprise surveys and course evaluations, we’ve conducted a very small pilot of the tool this summer and continued efforts on an initial draft of a building block that provides an alternate report format.
For those interested in learning more about our efforts, I recorded this screencast demo of the functionality at this point that I can share with those who would like to see the building block deployed within our dev environment. I tried to avoid as much technical-specifics as possible and rather just show the workflows and functionality tweaks that we’ve envisioned.
A decision still hasn’t been made institutionally whether we will continue to pursue a wider pilot of the tool with additional building block enhancements to be requested, or look at other 3rd party tools.
For follow-up on any additional technical details about the tweaks and building block depicted, please contact Ruperto Herrera (rherrera@niu.edu) and Matt Kacskos (mkacskos1@niu.edu) who have done all the technical development work.
#ETT511 Greetings from Dr. J at #BbWorld14
For the next 4 days, I’ll be attending the BbWorld 2014 conference in Las Vegas. I’ll be frequently posting to social media using hashtag #BbWorld14 as well as blogging from the conference, prefixing all my BbWorld blog posts using hashtag #BbWorld14
I’m continuing to work on grading Unit 5 activities and will send a quick text message once Unit 5 scores and feedback are available for you in Blackboard. Enjoy your week…I’ll see you online!
~ Dr. J
Visitors and Residents: Understanding individuals’ Engagement with the Web Based on Motivation and Context
In this video David White (@daveowhite) of the University of Oxford explains how the Visitors and Residents model provides a framework to understand individuals’ engagement with the Web based on motivation and context. In part 1 of this series, he argues that the metaphors of ‘place’ and ‘tool’ best represent the use of technology in contemporary society and allow us to better adapt to the challenges of new forms of academic practice.
In part 2, David explains how the Web is changing academic practice and challenging traditional notions of credibility and authority.
Do his thoughts resonate with your experience with the Web? Leave a comment with your thoughts!
